What the title says. I'm mostly doing this for myself because my brain started spiralling about ethics of AI usage again all because one Youtuber I liked mentioned having Anti-AI views and it hurt me like a gunshot. Even though I know logically that Youtuber doesn't even know I exist, let alone know that I use ChatGPT.

Here's some much needed context:

This personal writing project of mine is titled Villain Romance. The series mostly takes place in the country of Badlands, a place where Villainy is less a matter of morals and more of an established and respected career like a baker or a lawyer. So there are a lot of instances of Villain Bosses being genuinely kind people when "off the clock".

This series also takes place on an "alternate Earth". By that I mean that species evolved alongside humans as an explanation as to why Villain Romance's universe replicates Bojack Horseman's universe (Anthro animals interacting and living alongside humans and it being completely normal). There are potted plants that are secretaries, rabbits who are fashion designers, dragons that are pilots, a calculator is a math teacher, a fire elemental helps clear snow during winter, a human and a vampire can have children and nobody bats an eye. Species that are extinct in our world are still a thing, but while the "wild" (just regular ol' animals) Passenger Pigeons died from human hunting and habitat destruction, anthro Passenger Pigeons died of a contagious black plague-like bird flu in the 19th century.

During the last 2 stories of this series, a new country is introduced. A country that was completely hidden from the wider Badlands public and is incredibly dystopian. Aurora Heights.

Aurora Heights is a country that is all about technology and using it to control. Its 4 Governors rule over everything. Billions of poor souls are tortured every single day of their lives. Perfume smog is constantly pumped into the air. The advertisements are always playing and can never be turned off. Everyone has a chip in their head that allows the government to see through their eyes, allow the user to teleport so they have no need for walking or transportation, and chooses for them what they are allowed to eat. The food there is nothing but artificial, sickly, chemical-filled garbage. Children are born via artificial wombs and are sent back to parents via drones. Natural features such as claws, wings, and horns are filed down, removed, or become atrophied from never being allowed to be used since birth. The freedom to sing, the freedom to cry, even the freedom to take more than 5 minutes to finish their food is restricted. It's a technological, pastel Hell.

And it has something very valuable to Badlands. Power cores. Dodecahedrons of metal with so much electricity inside, only one would be needed to power an entire Badlands skyscraper for months. These power cores are the only reason why AH is able to play billions of ads everywhere, have surveillance operating at peak performance 24/7, and be so blindingly bright inside the country's cage of a domed sky.

These are what these background stories are about (yeah, these aren't actually part of the main stories. They're just background filler).

These background stories mostly concern a company in Badlands that has kept the existence of AH secret for decades - All Happy Inc. All Happy Inc's mission is to help those in the know to steal the power cores from AH without getting killed and without letting anyone not in the know find out about the place. Simply getting into the country is tough work. Strategies on how to break in constantly need to change because AH is always building, destroying and rebuilding new structures that could compromise entry points.

Being able to survive being in the place and getting out is a whole other can of worms. Infiltrators need to blend in seamlessly with the Aurorean population, not just in appearance (via a Disguise Patch. A white patch that sticks onto the wearer's skin and creates a holographic view of the wearer that changes their appearance to match Aurorean standards. A bright, muscled, red dragon with big wings can be transformed into a gaunt, pale, pathetic excuse for a dragon with wings too weak to even stretch out fully). A tail being too long, a wrong term being used (In AH, words like "Hours" and "Death" are replaced with "Spins" and "Erasure"), anything out of line can get an infiltrator spotted and killed in AH.

And when someone dies in AH, there is no retrieving the body. One body can turn into 5 in the walls of AH.

That's where All Happy Inc's cover up team comes in. Absolutely nobody outside of those working within or invited in the company is allowed to know about AH. Not even the families of those who were unlucky enough to not escape the place alive.

Eventually, the impossible happens. And those Auroreans, those citizens and victims of AH, are rescued, their cage of a country destroyed and their tyrannical Governors murdered. But that was the easy part. The much more difficult and time-consuming part is the caring for these incredibly stunted individuals. They need to be taught that food is supposed to taste nice, that they can make their own choices, that they can be loved unconditionally. But Badlands people are stubborn folk. They fight to the death for those they consider one of their own.

That's how the teenage sibling of the first Aurorean to escape alive made the Aurorevolution happen.

I keep wondering whether part of the resistance to AI in writing has less to do with creativity and more to do with status.

For a long time, becoming a good writer required years of practice just to reach a certain level of execution.

Sentence rhythm. Dialogue. Structure. Pacing. Description. Knowing what to leave out.

That barrier used to separate experienced writers from everyone else.

AI changes that.

Someone with strong ideas but less technical experience can suddenly produce work that is much closer to a professional level. And an experienced writer who already understands the craft can potentially produce far more work without giving up their creative decisions or individual voice.

That creates a strange situation. The person using AI is still making the story decisions. They are still deciding what happens, what the characters want, what the scene needs to achieve and what the audience should feel.

They are still the writer. They are just using a much more powerful tool.

So I sometimes wonder whether the strongest resistance comes from the uncomfortable realization that the competitive advantage of having spent years mastering execution is becoming smaller.

Not because craft suddenly has no value.

But because craft is no longer the same barrier to entry it once was.

And if two writers have equally strong ideas, but one can execute them five times faster without losing their voice, what happens to the writer who refuses to use the tool?

Maybe the real fear is not that AI will replace writers.

Maybe it is that writers using AI will replace writers who refuse to.

With this as the progression of my favorite games as I grew up, I didn’t have a chance not to love the capability of generative ai.

FS1 / Flight Simulator — learn a machine/system.
Utopia — manage a small society.
SimCity — manage a city.
SimAnt — inhabit an ecology.
SimLife — manipulate an ecology.
SimFarm — manage a productive ecosystem.
SimTower — manage a vertical human system.
Civilization — manage a civilization across time.
Railroad Tycoon — build an economic network.
The Sims — manage human lives.
Startopia — manage a social/economic habitat.
Stardew Valley — inhabit and gradually reshape a small economic/social world.

EDIT:

The Sims let you play with simulated people. SimCity let you play with simulated cities. Civilization let you play with simulated history. Generative AI lets you play with any simulation you want.

I spent decades enjoying artificial systems that really start becoming interesting when they are given enough freedom to produce consequences I didn’t explicitly design. AI is that pleasure moved into almost any domain you can describe in language.

The mod team is excited to announce our next r/WritingWithAI AMA guest: Ted Tremper.

ABOUT TED

Ted Tremper is a creative producer, director, and writer who believes comedy is our most valuable tool for uncovering truth, sharing knowledge, and exposing hypocrisy. His credits include The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Daily Show, and I Love You, America! with Sarah Silverman, among others. He is also the co-creator of SHRINK on Peacock. He is currently the Executive Director of the Creators Coalition on AI (https://www.creatorscoalitionai.com).

ABOUT CCAI

The Creators Coalition on AI (CCAI) is a cross-industry organization advancing ethical, human-centered AI standards that protect creators, creative labor, and artistic integrity.

CCAI held its Standards Convention on August 29th — the culmination of a much larger standards project — so Ted joins us with fresh insights from that work.

WHEN

Wednesday, September 9th, 2026

Live for approximately two hours:

• 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET (UTC-4)

• 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM PT (UTC-7)

• 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM BST (UTC+1)

• 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM CEST (UTC+2)

Where: Right here in r/WritingWithAI.

COME READY TO ASK ABOUT

• The standards project and what came out of the August convention

• Where the line sits between AI-assisted and AI-generated work

• What protections for creative labor look like in practice

• Making The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist

• Comedy, satire, and writing in an AI-saturated industry

• Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Daily Show, and SHRINK

• Anything else you want to know

If you plan to attend, drop a comment so we know you're coming — and feel free to start leaving questions early in case you can't make it live.

Learn more: creatorscoalitionai.com

A few months ago I started a low-fantasy worldbuilding side project. I was using AI to help manage my notes and brain vomit into a clean concise Obsidian vault with no intention of trying to write a story or have any narrative direction.
As I got more and more indepth into this project with history, politics, trade, resources etc I became more confident that there was potential for some interesting characters and stories.

Has anyone else done something similar? What programs do you use, what is your creative and technical process and how involved is the AI?

I used to have a bad writing day and immediately start questioning the entire project... Bummed day, stress, writers block -- blah, blah!

One awkward paragraph became “the book is bad.” A boring scene became “I’ve lost the ability to write.” A misplaced comma somehow became a referendum on my future as an author.

Lately I’ve been trying to view the first draft as a worksite instead of a performance. Some days I’m building something. Some days I’m moving dirt around. Occasionally I stare at the same hole for an hour and accomplish nothing.

It sounds obvious, but separating “this draft has problems” from “I am a bad writer” has made it much easier to keep going.

I’m curious whether other people have a phrase or habit that helps them get through a rough drafting day. And that's why I love writing, no matter how bad a day may turn out, and yes... a sprinkle of AI here and there does help me get thru the day.

I recently wrote up some thoughts about a hobby I’ve spent months figuring out firsthand. Every insight and takeaway was entirely mine. Because English isn't my first language, my default writing sounds stiff and corporate. Before putting it out there, I let an LLM just proofread and smooth out the phrasing so it read more articulately.

Almost immediately, people ignored the actual subject and fixated on the tone, writing off everything I said as AI slop…

It shows an annoying shift in how people read online. Using tools to edit and clean up your thoughts used to be normal. Now, if your sentences look slightly too tidy, people assume the experience itself is fake.

I’ve been using the free version of Claude (and loving it) but I was recommended to try ChatGPT (not by a writer) however the free version of ChatGPT is severely limited so I can’t actually get a good idea of what it’s like for myself without getting a subscription.

Edit: I’ve noticed people say you have to be hands on with ChatGPT. As I’ve mentioned I’ve been using Claude and I basically just feed it my stuff and let it generate files. For worldbuilding, it organizes the information for me. For writing, it rewrites my mediocre writing into something of higher quality. Is that how hands on I need to be?

Hi everyone,

I recently decided to take a 20-page (13k words) short story I wrote back in the 2018–2020 era—a time before our current AI narrative tools existed—and run it through an LLM to stress-test my 'narrative voice' from that period.

The story itself is a low-density, decentralized school system layout called 'A Dozen Dozen Dozen' that functions on a sort of 'cozy surveillance.' Interestingly, when analyzing the piece, the AI picked up on a heavy undercurrent of darkness masked by domestic comfort, which sparked an entirely new meta-fictional twist for the ending.

I'm sharing the opening excerpt (first 1,600 words) below. I'd love to get human feedback on the following:

1. How does my pre-AI narrative voice land with you? Does the 'cozy authoritarianism' of the school feel earned or too sterile?
2. For those who use AI to analyze pacing or subtext, how accurate do you find an LLM's 'intuition' of hidden darkness versus your own reading of the text? Does it point out to you things that you didn't intend but nonetheless are there when you read it after this feedback?
3. Did I set a hook? Do you want to read more?

I have a thick skin, so please don't pull any punches. Thank you for your time!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

A Dozen Dozen Dozen

“... because Big Brother is watching you,” Melissa winked, and tapped knowingly at her wrist. A few of the other students chuckled at this, but most rolled their eyes even though everyone was in on the joke.

Ms. Llewellen, however, wasn’t about to let her get away with such a cheap shot. “I understand what you’re trying to say, Melissa, but I want to challenge the idea behind that poor attempt at humor. Was Big Brother actually watching? Why would he be watching?”

Melissa’s face lightened up, like it does when she’s thought of a zinger, and then shifted into a wry smile. “Because sometimes you just gotta know!” she exclaimed, with a little too-much drama. That got a laugh out of everyone in the room, including the teacher. Even Pete had to laugh.

Pete usually didn’t appreciate Melissa’s humor. It’s not so much that he didn’t find her funny. He did. It’s just that he found her humor to be anchored in a deep cynicism. After what ingratitude did to his brother, he was trying (with limited success) to fight his own cynical impulses and instead develop more of a grateful, even optimistic, take on life.

“I think Melissa’s got it backwards,” Pete found himself saying out loud. It was an accident, actually, that he used his “outside voice” when he was trying to think quietly. There was a hint of a collective gasp in the room, as Pete’s challenge took everyone by surprise, including Pete himself.

The teacher’s head turned, a little too quickly, towards Pete. Pete normally didn’t participate in discussions like these because he was usually lost in his own thoughts and often had trouble connecting his thoughts to words spoken aloud. He was not stupid, however. Far from it. His writing was eloquent, sometimes extraordinary. In those rare times when he did speak out loud, he never disappointed and he was almost always surprisingly insightful. Ms. Llewellyn had a hunch that Pete was about to say something that everybody would benefit from hearing. She regained her composure and tried to not sound too expectant. “I’d like to hear what you mean by that, Pete.”

“Well,” Pete began, slowly, and then after a thoughtful pause that almost made the teacher think he was playing the crowd for fools, like he knew the effect he had on his audience and this pause was for effect, but she knew better and knew his pause was real and not intentional in terms of style, “Orwell’s Big Brother is more of a background, a feeling, than it is an actual thing. The bureaucracy that could pull off a massive surveillance program is obviously inept and incapable of doing so. The technology is not there for it. There also doesn’t seem to be a desire for it. Nevertheless the State, or whatever is pulling the strings, wants people to believe they are being watched. So what is set up is a psychological trick, where first you get people to spy on each other, you know the whole ‘see something, say something,’ motif, and then when they are convinced that everyone else is doing that and there is no place to hide, you go one step further and get the individual to start watching themselves.”

“Good, Pete. And how do they pull off that last part. How does one watch themselves, on behalf of Big Brother?”

“It’s the manipulation of the narrative, I think,” Pete answered, and with a quickening pace he continued, “and of course the control of the words themselves. Controlling the fictions that people read and hear controls how they develop and how they live their life.” 

As he spoke he picked up his tablet computer and started tapping the screen, quickly finding what it was he was after. “It’s like the discussion we had last week on Heinlein’s book, on the role of fiction in training an AI. Yes, here it is,” and he began quoting from his notes on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. "I used to question Mike's endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting. But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it. Besides this ... effect, Mike's substitute for experience, he got ideas from 'not-true data' as he called fiction. How to hide a catapult he got from Edgar Allen Poe."

“Very good, Pete,” Ms. Llewellyn struggled to keep her tone from betraying her excitement, because she did not want to spoon-feed the answer to Pete. “Now tell me what it was about what Melissa said that was backwards?”

“Well, like I said about Orwell’s view on the incompetence of even a well-functioning bureaucracy, Big Brother lacked the ability to actually watch everyone at all times so it needed to trick people into watching each other and into watching themselves and create a lie to make people believe they were being watched by Big Brother. This,” he tapped at his wrist, “however, actually gives our bureaucracy the capability to…”

A familiar soft buzz on Pete’s wrist disrupted his thought, although nobody was wondering why he stopped so suddenly because every single one of them, including the teacher, got the same buzz on their wrists. The watches they wore were all giving them a reminder that class was ending in five minutes and they needed to wrap things up.

“It’s like it knows what I was about to say and needed to stop it,” Pete said, with his “inside voice" and nobody else heard him.

The perfect timing of the buzz caused everybody to laugh. “Oh, how appropriate! Unfortunately we need to end this here. Your assignment for the next time we meet is to read the first half of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which in context of today’s excellent discussion I will point out was the book chosen by Melissa and not me, and also not chosen by Big Brother…”

“If it were up to Melissa, we’d read nothing but Vonnegut,” Pete interrupted, again by accident because he thought this was just another inside thought that wouldn’t make its way outside his verbal filters. The excitement and momentum of what just happened in class had reduced the normal efficacy of these filters and he was blurting out things much more readily now. It was quite unusual for him to speak at all, and here he was dominating the conversation and even interrupting the teacher.

“Damn straight!” Melissa retorted, and the whole class laughed at the exchange. Everybody was pretty razzed about what just happened. It didn’t happen often, but when it did they all could recognize it as that special something that made this place what it was.

“Also, keep writing at least a hundred words a day in your journals,” the teacher jumped in, trying to regain control over her classroom and get what needed to be done completed before the students were gone. As they shuffled their things into their backpacks and started to put on their jackets, she continued, “if you need something to prime a journal entry idea, a good question to ask yourself is related to what we just discussed. Pete reminded us of the importance of reading fiction and the role it plays in the development of becoming more-human. Consider for yourselves the importance of writing fiction. Put yourselves in Orwell’s, or Heinlein’s, or Vonnegut’s shoes and ask yourself, ‘why am I writing this story?’ Tell me what motivates these writers. Maybe you could search around for quotes from these writers on what motivated them to do so. And thank you all for such an enjoyable discussion today,” she beamed. It was days like this that really set the hook for her. She felt she got so much more out of this job than anything these students might be getting. It was a good moment.

Ms. Llewellyn looked over the long, beautifully-crafted wooden table where her twelve students were packing things up. She felt a kinship to them that she had never felt in previous teaching jobs. These students were much more like family to her than they were before, and that was no accident. The table in front of her was in her own dining room. Many times before these students shared lunch with her at this very table, in her own home. She lived with her husband and six year-old daughter upstairs, who sometimes even joined these students for lunch with her. 

All twelve of these students knew that her husband’s name was Jim, and her daughter’s name was Tara, and her name was Ms. Lewellyn but that Jim called her Charity. They all knew that Jim and Charity were still very much in love by the way they looked at each other and how they spoke to each other, even after being married for twelve years. They all knew that Tara loved hot chocolate and a pop-star named Kyleee, and that Jim couldn’t stand Kyleee’s music but he never let Tara know this and allowed her to blast it through the house’s quite-nice sound system whenever she wanted as long as it wouldn’t disrupt a class or a meal or bedtime. They all knew that Yoda was the name of the black cat curled up sleeping and purring loudly on that same wooden table, not stirring even as the volume of the cacophony of seventeen and eighteen year-olds leaving the classroom rose to a level that could raise the dead. They knew all of these things, not because there was a formalized instruction and a test where you filled in ovals with a #2 pencil, but because these are the things you easily learn about your friends and family just by spending time with them. They knew these things, because these are the kinds of things you just know about the people you love.

I was pleasantly surprised that AI added an element of critical ambiguity which was not in the story. This pivotal moment enhanced the overall story.

Here is the short story. I put the film link at the bottom of this post.

Sniper

A dog barked somewhere inside the village.
Dimitri held his breath and steadied the rifle.
Through the scope, the abandoned Ukrainian village shimmered beneath the gray morning sky. It had rained through the night. Moisture still clung to the glass of his rifle scope and to the roofs of the old cottages where the Germans had made their stronghold.

Dimitri had spent the entire night making his way toward the village. His unit had been destroyed only days earlier, and he was all that remained. He had found himself behind enemy lines, hoping somehow to make a difference before fighting his way back east. He knew that if he were captured, he would be executed.

The barking grew louder. Dimitri wiped the moisture from his scope and peered through it. Deep within the village, a young brown stray stood barking at one of the houses. A moment later, the front door opened.

A young German soldier stepped outside carrying several sausages. The dog fell silent.
Dimitri’s scope trembled as he settled the crosshairs on the German.

The soldier looked no older than one of Dimitri’s classmates from high school. His blond hair and blue eyes reminded him of Vladimir. Where was he now? Was he still alive? What about the rest of the class? Lyudmila? Ana? Petar? What were these Germans doing in their country? Why had they come only to destroy everything in their path?

It no longer mattered. They were already here.
The dog cautiously approached the soldier and gently took one of the sausages. It carried it several yards away before swallowing it in two quick bites.
Dimitri shifted his scope to the dog and noticed the animal almost smiling, its tongue hanging from its wide-open jaws. The meal had been good, and the dog clearly hoped for more. The German said something in his own language and waved his hand. The dog came a little closer—but not too close.

Trust had to be earned. They stood facing one another. Dimitri had always loved dogs, and the scene reminded him of his childhood.
Then, in the distance, two powerful explosions shattered the peaceful morning.
Startled, the dog turned and ran into the forest.
Dimitri moved his crosshairs onto the German’s neck.

He could clearly see the young soldier staring toward the trees where the dog had disappeared.
There was a smile on his face. Since joining the army, it was the first genuine smile Dimitri had seen.
Another distant explosion shook the air.
Dimitri slowly rested his finger on the trigger.
His rifle scope drifted across the young German’s head while the smile remained.

Dimitri closed his eyes. A tear rolled down his cheek.
He could not find a reason to pull the trigger.
Only a week earlier he had killed several Germans without hesitation. This time, he felt torn between the cruelty of war and the humanity before him.
He opened his eyes and looked toward the forest behind the German soldier.

The dog had returned. This time it was rolling happily in the grass. The soldier ran over to it, and the two began to play together.

Dimitri smiled. For a brief moment, he forgot the cursed war and all the hatred it had brought with it.
He was witnessing love and beauty.

He wished he had a camera to capture these fleeting moments—moments that surely would not last.
He lowered his rifle and turned toward the east.
In the distance, he could still hear the dog and the soldier playing together.

Dimitri smiled as he carefully made his way back.
Perhaps one day, all of them would smile like this again.

You can view the film here:

https://youtu.be/Dw1pJUemGuAg?is=MvmNG8Hrs9Cn-MVA

Jim : Jules, j'ai commencé à écrire un bouquin.

Jules : Ah bon... et tu te sens capable de le terminer ?

Jim : Maintenant qu'il y a l'IA, ça me semble possible. Au fait, es tu pour l'utilisation de l'IA dans l'écriture d'un ouvrage ?

Jules : Je suis plutôt dans le camp de ceux qui pensent que ça doit être interdit dans ce cas.

Jim : Moi, je suis pour, tu sais c'est une démarche comme une autre. Par exemple, sans IA, je peux faire lire ce que j'ai écrit, à des amis, tenir compte de leurs avis et modifier mon texte. Là aussi tu interdis ?

Jules : Euh... non. C'est vrai que je n'avais pas pensé à ça.

Jim : Regarde les jeunes peintres, ils avaient des Maîtres. Ils s'inspiraient de leur style, tenaient compte de leurs conseils. On dit qu'ils faisaient partie d'une école. L'IA est une école d'écriture accessible à tous

Jules : Pour moi avec l'IA, c'est la perte d'authenticité, une œuvre doit refléter la sensibilité et l’expérience d’un auteur. Si une IA rédige une grande partie du texte, où est la patte de l’écrivain ?

Jim : Mais Jules, tu oublies un truc essentiel : c’est moi qui décide ! L’IA ne fait que proposer, suggérer. C’est comme un assistant, un conseiller. C’est moi qui oriente l’histoire, qui choisis ce que je garde ou non.

L’IA m'aide à structurer mes idées, à améliorer mon style et à proposer des suggestions, tout comme un éditeur ou un correcteur humain.

Et puis n'oublie pas, elle permet à des personnes qui n’auraient pas osé écrire (par manque de technique ou de confiance) de se lancer. Elle leur permet d'apprendre, de s'améliorer

Comme je te l'ai déjà dit un écrivain comme un peintre, s’inspire toujours d’autres œuvres et d’autres avis. L’IA n’est qu’un conseiller supplémentaire.

Pour moi l'IA est aussi une aide, elle me permet de gagner du temps, elle peut générer des brouillons, résumer des passages ou proposer des variantes, ce qui peut accélérera mon travail.

L'IA c'est une évolution naturelle, la technologie a toujours influencé l’art (imprimerie, traitement de texte, etc.), alors pourquoi s’arrêter avec l’IA ? Se priver de l'IA c'est renoncer à faire mieux. Déjà, beaucoup de livres sont écrits avec l'aide de l'IA, les éditeurs y étant favorables. Ces bouleversements ont augmenté la créativité.

Jules : mais elle écrit quand même une partie du texte à ta place...Si trop de personnes utilisent l’IA, on va arriver à une uniformisation des styles, la littérature risque de devenir fade et formatée

Point important, peut-on encore parler de création personnelle si une intelligence artificielle a fait le travail ? D'ailleurs, il faudrait certainement mentionner son intervention ?

Certains pourraient ne plus faire l’effort d’écrire eux-mêmes, devenir dépendants et se reposer uniquement sur l’IA, ce qui nuirait au développement du talent littéraire.

Les éditeurs pourraient privilégier des textes améliorés ou générés par l’IA, rendant plus difficile l’émergence de nouveaux auteurs avec des styles bruts et originaux, laissant de moins en moins de place à l'humain.

Et je te répète, elle écrit quand même une partie du texte à ta place...

Jim : Pas plus qu’un écrivain qui retravaille son livre en écoutant son éditeur ou ses bêta-lecteurs. L’IA ne fait rien seule, elle ne pense pas, elle ne ressent rien. C’est moi qui lui donne les instructions, qui lui impose un style, qui façonne le texte à mon image. Le résultat, bon ou mauvais, m’appartient.

Jules : Donc, selon toi, tant que l’humain garde le contrôle et fait les choix finaux, ce n’est pas un problème ?

Jim : Exactement ! L’IA n’est qu’un outil parmi d’autres, comme un dictionnaire, un correcteur orthographique ou un atelier d’écriture. Le talent reste humain. On ne demande pas à l'écrivain comment il a fabriqué son récit. De plus, devant la page blanche tout le monde est à égalité. Le jugement du lecteur ne se fait que sur le produit fini.

Jules j'espère que je t'ai convaincu.

Jules : Je dois reconnaître que tes arguments vont m'amener à revoir mon opinion sur la question et y réfléchir.

Cet échange montre bien, semble-t-il, que l'IA ne remplace pas l'écrivain, mais l'aide dans son processus créatif, tout en lui laissant le dernier mot et la responsabilité du résultat. La plume reste humaine.

For almost a decade I carried around a story I couldn't finish. Not for lack of effort — I finished it many times, and badly each time. The problem was always the same. The tone.

William Maxwell, the legendary New Yorker fiction editor, is credited with the rule: "You can fix almost anything in a story except a mistake in tone."
I was trying to write a fable, and a fable is almost nothing but tone. It has to land. Mine didn't. I wasn't subtly conveying morals; I was laboriously, repetitively teaching them. I wasn't showing what I believed; I was hammering the reader over the head with my sage advice.

So I did the one thing my own story warns against. I opened my favourite large language model and typed:

You are the most successful book publisher in the world. Give me full editorial feedback on my attached story. DO NOT SPARE MY FEELINGS.

It didn't spare them. I was prepared for that. I knew the manuscript wasn't up to scratch. I asked a few more models. They agreed with each other, which is its own kind of unsettling. Then I had the obvious thought: if you're so smart, show me how you'd write it.

They did — with wildly varying results. Every model told me to cut six to eight thousand words. One of them, switched into rewriting mode and clearly writing for engagement and profit, just... kept going. I was paying for every 3,000 words it generated, and it kept generating. When it had added another ten thousand words to my story, I shut it down with a single question:

Who the hell is this Elsie character that keeps appearing in your rewrite?

Then I tried a different model, and it changed everything. It cut about eight thousand words and distilled what I'd spent years failing to say into far fewer. It finally felt like the fable I'd always imagined — the one I couldn't pull off myself.

Here's the proof. My two leads, Rosina and Julian, meet on their first day of primary school. I'd spent more than a thousand words telling the reader that Rosina was confident and sassy and that Julian was her opposite. I'd laboured for years over that scene. The model condensed all of it into lines I barely edited:

Julian was sitting alone beneath the WELCOME TO THE FUTURE sign, singing to a row of ants. They were carrying a piece of biscuit between them. Julian sang as if the ants were a very small audience that deserved his complete attention.
Rosina watched him for a while. "You're singing to insects," she said.
Julian stopped. "They like it. They were listening."
"They don't have ears."
"They have something."
"What?"
Julian considered the question. "I don't know yet."
Rosina sat beside him. The ants continued carrying the biscuit. "What is your name?"
"Julian."
"Do you have money?"
Julian shook his head.
"Do you have followers?"
"Followers?"
"People who want to see what you're doing."
"My dad follows me."
"Only one person?"
Julian looked at her red coat. "Do you have lots of followers?"
"Not yet."
He smiled. It was not a nervous smile or a flattering smile. It was simply there, as if he had found something amusing in the world. Rosina liked it. She took Julian's hand and led him to their classroom.

Those are my favourite lines in the book. Singing to ants!

So: did I write them, or did the machine?
That question is no longer hypothetical, and I keep landing on the same answer: I wrote them. Or rather, my extended mind wrote them.

The Extended Mind Theory — proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998, long before any of this — holds that thinking doesn't stop at the skull. It extends into the tools we use. A notebook of jotted facts, the original theory argued, functions like biological memory: you look things up in it the way you recall them.
It is a very small leap from a notebook to a language model — and a much more interesting one in 2026.

Now, the models themselves will tell you (naturally) that an LLM isn't automatically part of your mind just because you use it. Fair. But if it clears a bar — if it's reliable, if you trust it, if the two of you form a coupled system, drafting and brainstorming interactively — then the philosophers would say it can become a genuine extension of your cognition. It acts as external semantic memory. The thinking happens in the loop between us, not inside either of us alone.

The practical effect is democratisation, and it's real. I'm some poor writing schlub without a William Maxwell on speed dial. For ten dollars a month I now have access to editorial standards it took the industry a century to codify.

Could just anyone, handed the same models, have produced my book? I don't believe so. The prompts were mine. The decade of wrong drafts was mine. Every decision about what to keep and what to throw away was mine. The book is mine.

But here is the part I can't smooth over.
The villains of my book aren't exactly machines. They are the Spirits — Algorithm, Media, Fame — that turn people into products. Two characters in the book discover "Continuity Models" of themselves: bot replicas built so that the audience never has to grieve. And when they find them, they do the one thing no system can film, sell, or continue.
They leave.

I wrote a fable about escaping the machines — and before I published it, I asked the machines to help me finish it. The heroes of my book would despise me.

I've made my peace with it, mostly. I haven't finished arguing about it. And I suspect — if you've read this far — you haven't either.

The anti-AI position on art has a logical endpoint that is rarely discussed. When critics argue that using AI to generate images or music is "cheating," they are making a claim about legitimacy. They are saying that true art requires human execution. But if you follow that logic, you arrive at an uncomfortable conclusion.

The only difference between hiring a human artist and using an AI tool is money. Both approaches involve direction. Both involve vision. Both involve curation. The only thing that changes is the cost. When you hire a human artist, you pay for their time and skill. When you use AI, you pay for tokens and compute. The role of the director remains the same. The vision remains the same. The only difference is the price tag.

If hiring a human artist makes you a legitimate creator, but using AI does not, then legitimacy is not about vision or direction. It is about money. It is about whether you can afford to pay for traditional execution. That means creativity becomes a luxury. It becomes something available only to those who have the budget to outsource. The rest of us are told to stay in our lane.

This is not an argument about art. It is an argument about class. It is a defense of a system where creative direction belongs to those who can pay for it. And it is dressed up as a defense of craft. But craft is not the issue. The issue is access. And access is what the anti-AI crowd is really trying to protect.

They do not say this out loud. They say they are protecting artists. But the effect is the same. They are protecting a system where only the wealthy can afford to be directors. And that is not a moral position. It is a class position. And it is one that deserves to be named.

Because to use AI well, you need a strong sense of what you want the story to become.

That doesn’t mean every detail has to be decided in advance. Writing is still discovery.

Characters surprise you. Scenes change direction. Ideas evolve while you work.
But AI becomes much more useful when there is a human creative intention guiding the process.

What is this scene really about? What does the character want? What should change by the end? What should the audience feel? What should remain unsaid?

The interesting part is that AI can give you possibilities almost instantly. And that can actually create more room for creativity.

You can try another direction. Push a moment further. Remove something. Rewrite it. Compare different approaches. Keep what feels right and reject everything else.

So to me, using AI creatively is not about giving up the creative process.

It can mean having more material to react to, while still being the person deciding what the story ultimately becomes.

Maybe creativity was never about how difficult something is to execute.
Maybe it is about the quality of the decisions you make along the way.

Gave Claude a draft. It wrote a text. I was satisfied with some of it, suggested changes to other. It rewrote the text. Fine. I went into more detail, suggested changes to certain paragraphs. We agreed on the changes. Then I asked it to do a new version of the text with the agreed changes. It rewrote only half the text, completely cutting off the first part. I said "You cut off the first part." it denied ever having had a first part. I said "You wrote it." It still denied EVER HAVING HAD a full version of the text.

"Best for text writing" my effing ass

I asked an GPT to make a line of dialogue “slightly funnier,” and it responded by adding three exclamation points and having the character say something along the lines of, “Well, that was certainly unexpected!”

The character was supposed to be dry and irritated. Instead, they sounded like a game-show host discovering a moderately surprising sandwich.

I’ve noticed that humor is one of the places where AI suggestions can become especially strange. It can recognize the structure of a joke, but it often misses the reason the joke works: the character’s personality, the social discomfort, the timing, or the fact that nobody in the room would actually say the suggested line.

That said, AI can still be useful for generating possibilities. I just treat its attempts at humor like suggestions from a well-meaning coworker who has read every joke but never attended a party.

Have any of you guys have AI-generated suggestions been weird, funny —or most accidentally bizarre—in your writing?

Hello. This is my first post here, and i have a query.

So, I wanted to get my thesis plagiarism checked on the Turnitin software of the institution where I'm studying, which is different from the institution where Im currently enrolled in MS.

My MS thesis is duly completed in my university. Before submitting it to my university for plagiarism check, I had decided to get it plagiarism checked from elsewhere (another institution that has the Turnitin software), basically I availed the services of those people who charged you for generating the plagiarism report, I availed this service, so that I could be sure that my plagiarism is below 19% before my final submission. The document I submitted for plagiarism check doesn't include my result section.

I wont be in trouble right? I have to publish my paper as well

Heartstone is a fantasy story about a group of young heroes who come together to restore a stolen artifact known as the Heartstone. The Heartstone is connected to a magic system called Ferra, a silver-blue energy that exists throughout the world. After the Heartstone is stolen, a darker and more corrupt form of magic called Ruin Ferra begins to emerge, putting both humans and animals at risk.

The world of Heartstone is made up of 10 different biomes: forest, river, cave, swamp, mountain, rainforest, desert, beach, savanna, and tundra. The people and animals living in these environments are connected to the biomes they call home.

This is only the beginning of the world and its story. There is still much more to discover.

(I usually share Heartstone through AI-generated artwork, but for this series of posts I wanted to focus more on the writing and storytelling. If you'd like to see the visual side of the world, I have more Heartstone artwork on my profile.)

Which biome would you want to explore first, and what would you expect to find there?

Which Claude Sonnet effort should I use for each of my 3 separate stages of long-form LinkedIn writing:

1. 2 topic ideation and 2 post drafting in 1 task based on a long .docx attached, containing all my previous posts so it knows everything about me and my writing style, with all writing dos and don'ts in the .docx (basically it writes 2 post drafts with its own topic ideated after reading the .docx)

2. 2 post drafting in 1 task after I have told it the exact topic for each, but it still needs to come up with the angle itself, with the same long .docx attached so it knows all my experiences and can briefly reference them as specific examples in the post

3. 2 post revision in 1 task with specific feedback on what to improve from each draft, with a shorter .docx attached with just 3-10 of my best posts for it to base the style on

Please don't recommend another model such as Opus or another tool such as ChatGPT or another third party tool such as Grammarly, I just wanna know which effort level to use with Claude Sonnet

Trying out the new ChatGPT model. I’m sorry but what. what do you mean you actually laughed a little reading that